Its soo annoying, many of the childrens DVD's you buy here in Australia from the ABC shop or whereever are Region 2. Now all DVD players just ignore it, EXCEPT my bloody Macs.. so I keep having to change it and I'm now going to run out.

Another example of stupid rights management stuff getting in the way of legitimate use. These discs are sold HERE in Australia.

How can I just turn this crap off?

Daniel.

There are firmware updates available on the internet that will turn off region coding, but these are very much at your own risk. They will void your warranty, and there is a slight chance they could damage your drive.

I think that VLC will play any DVD ignoring region coding. Have you tried that?

I have a Samsung DVD player that was brought for $90 dollars and it plays all regions out of the box with no problems
The dvd's sold in Australia should be all region 4 I thought?? region 2 is for Europe/ Japan

I agree that this is stupid and annoying. I had to change the region twice just because of renting a DVD.

What's worse, the ONLY reason for these regional codings is so that the companies can maximize profit around the world. Wouldn't want competition to get in the way after all!

Yes, Silver is correct.
VLC will play DVD's from any region without invoking the change of region on your DVD drive.
get it from VersionTracker, or videolan.org. It's freeware.

Flashing drive firmware to remove region coding usually requires the drive to be removed and run in a PC in DOS mode, as very few firmware tools run on Mac OSX. And I believe that Mac OSX's DVD Player software still pulls up the region change dialog anyhow - an annoyance.